Dreamer Read Online Free PDF Page A

head pushed forward, wig askew, and feet planted apart in two shapeless black shoes. She was utterly unselfconscious. Egoless, and flitted round the flat as though she had feet spun from air. Descending like twin trees from her checkered dress were two vein-cabled legs, lumpy in places, bowed, but it was her voice that everyone remembered most. Thinking she might be thirsty, I offered her a soda, which she declined, shaking her head and explaining, “Thank you, dah’ling, I’m tickled, but I bet’ not drink no pop, I might pee on myself.” Her bag was filled withmedicine for her heart and high blood pressure, ills of which she was heedless, saying, “Naw, I ain’t supposed to eat salt, but I eats it anyway. I eats
any
thing.”
    In point of fact, Mama Pearl was everybody’s grandmother. “There wasn’t nothin’ I didn’t do in the fields,” she said, speaking of her childhood in southern Illinois. Now she lived on Stony Island in a seventy-five-dollar-a-month walkup with no running water, where she passed her time crocheting (she gave the minister a quilt she’d worked on for two years), “eye-shopping” (as she put it) in downtown stores, and fishing, which was her passion. She’d go with what she called another “senior” or Amy, having her granddaughter lug along a bulging bag of fried chicken, cookies, grapes and peaches, a few ribs, and a thermos. For Mama Pearl fishing was a social event, one to be shared as you ate and talked and played whist. Standing ankle-deep in the water, she’d throw out her line, but was almost too afraid of saltwater worms to slice and bait them (they were hairy and huge and had serrated teeth like a saw). During her afternoon at the flat, she brought forth from her enormous bag three canisters of her own home-cooked raspberry, apricot, and cinnamon rugelach, which she distributed to the entire staff. She inspected everything, involved herself with everyone, including me (“Now, you don’t mind my bein’ nosy, do you, Matthew? I was jes ovah there talkin’ to that light-skinned fellah and he didn’t mind”), and giggled like a young girl, “Ain’t I somethin’?” Before leaving she collected SCLC stationery as souvenirs for the other “seniors” in her church and, waving good-bye at the door, assured us all that “I had a re-e-e-al fine time.”
    So had we all, especially King, who kissed her hand as she left (again she giggled), and Amy, who seemed aglow whenever she looked at the grandmother who’d taught her Scripture and how to be a woman, how to crochet, that she could use a string and old tin can for fishing just as easily asa pole and line, and that at all times she must remember others. Yes, she’d taken care of Amy well, raising her—or so I thought—to be as pure in love and self-forgetfulness and service as herself, though Amy at twenty, with her brilliant Dorothy Dandridge smile, was drop-dead beautiful. She did not eat meat. Synthetic fabrics, she said, gave her a rash. She had briefly studied drama and modern dance at Columbia College, where I’d first seen her in the hallways, but then she ran short on funds and took whatever temporary job turned up—short-order cook, dayworker, then watching the Lawndale flat after I’d recommended her for the job.
    I had my reasons for that.
    Compared with her, I was shy and unsure of myself in everything except my studies. Most of the time feelings banged and knocked through me like something trying to break free from inside. But I screwed up my courage and asked her out to dinner a week after she came to work. Amy thought about my request for a moment, her head cocked to one side, and simply replied, “I don’t eat.” I never had the courage to ask her again.
    To avoid her eyes, I turned to the minister, who said, “Well, where is he?”
    â€œI told him to